


Evolution Equation

by AmethystLuna



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Surreal, blood mention, discussion of internal organs but not for the sake of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-16
Updated: 2015-09-16
Packaged: 2018-04-21 02:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4811336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmethystLuna/pseuds/AmethystLuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Strife dreams about what he's made of and what it means to be considered a living being. An introspective from Strife's POV following Cadaeic's fanfic What's Yours Is Mine, written with permission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evolution Equation

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [what's yours is mine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2237097) by [cadaeic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadaeic/pseuds/cadaeic). 



> Author’s Note: A gift for Cadaeic, based on her fanfic and RP concepts we’ve worked on, including my own ideas about an origin for Parv. Background music for this: Disturbed’s cover of “The Sound of Silence”.

**Evolution Equation**

It was absurdly quiet and Strife didn’t care for it. There was no hum or clank of machinery, and he knew it was impossible for the building to run out of power so it should _not_ have been that quiet.

That is, providing he was even still in the Solutions Tower. He knew he hadn’t left it, the last thing he had done that day – all right, that _night_ \-- was to store away the DNA samples he’d been studying and trudge to his hidden bed for some sleep.

He was still rather proud of how he had avoided anyone getting a taglock on him.

However, that seemed to be such a far away and minor problem compared to how he found himself seated cross-legged on the floor with his eyes insistently closed so he wouldn’t see the tall mirrors encircling him. There was nothing but empty space beyond them if the glimpse he had gotten before the “reflections” had driven him to shut his eyes was an indication.

He kept hoping the sensation of sitting up would change to one of reclining in bed and that this was merely a side effect of having stayed up late too many nights in a row. He tried imagining the noise of the machinery he was used to, but the silence remained. Nothing was changing the way he wanted.

He knew what was to blame, because he knew what this was as much as he was trying to deny it. He was dreaming. _He didn’t dream._ This was all Parv’s fault. It was Parv’s _heart’s_ fault. Why had he ever thought it was a good idea to let Parv keep his heart and he take Parv’s instead?

It was ridiculous that he had cared so much about that idiot to even risk what he’d done. Maybe it had been a guilt thing, because he was the one who had taught Parv how to remove his heart, that container for emotions, in the first place. He was responsible for almost causing Parv to become an actual cold, empty psychopath. It would have been nice if the guitarist didn’t have that inclination to begin with. Not that Strife believed Parv could ever achieve anything so lofty; he didn’t have the attention span, for starters. But the thought of Parvis running around with zero emotion yet absolute focus gave him the oddest feeling inside, like it was an aberration against nature for Parv to be that way.

Perhaps it was because he had no room to talk of aberrations against nature.

It was Parv’s heart, now sitting in Strife’s chest and maybe pretending it was correctly installed to function like it was inside any old human body, that was causing him to dream. How the organ could even be having such an effect was boggling, it was only a human heart after all. The emotion side was one thing, but granting him dreams?

Some days he really had to wonder what Parv even was.

All this pondering was becoming a nice distraction from the dream. He didn’t want to look at the mirrors, wanted to deny or at least ignore what they were showing. He would rather try to figure out Parvis than face his own truth. He already knew what it was, he didn’t need to be reminded.

The mirrors all showed different things. One held a small mound of ashes, another  was in motion with a steady drip and splatter of a blood drop onto the same spot, while a third showed drifting specks of dust. Then there was one to his left that was filled to the edges with a thick fog stained red in some places, dark as pitch in others, and overall absorbing every mote of light to suffocate them. The other mirrors behind him held other things he didn’t care to acknowledge yet.

Regardless of motion, there was no sound accompanying the drips or wind blowing the dust around. The silence from the fog was just as unnerving. Things were moving, yet the lack of sound indicated none of it was truly _alive_.

His tower had so much life to it – life that he had given it by building the machines and giving them resources to run on. The power running through the floors to different devices and the sorting pipes with items flowing through them, it was like a great circulatory system, a creature breathing in the electricity and feeding from the nuclear energy. It wasn’t merely a business or merely providing solutions to the world. It was _life,_ a truly functioning, beautiful _life,_ and he had made it. And it was meant to be a useful life.

Inhaling deeply through his nose, Strife prepared to open his eyes. If this wasn’t going to disappear on its own he might as well stare it down. What else was there to do? He didn’t have an instruction manual or parts assembly guide for dreams. The images were annoying and too personal but there wasn’t any substance to them, surely. They couldn’t be tinkered with and repaired, they were just… images. The fact that they were inside mirrors was just some fanciful thing created by the stupid heart. If he didn’t suspect Parv’s _humanness_ hadn’t already infiltrated his original heart by now, he would trade the organs back so this dreaming business wouldn’t happen again.

He glanced to his left, giving the mirror full of mist a narrow-eyed look. _It all begins with you._ He poured as much resentment and vitriol into the thought as he could.

It might have been that mental tone or the fact that he finally addressed one of the mirrors, but a _something_ was triggered. The fog flickered and billowed, shifting to Strife’s right—

The mound of ash was blown aside as if by a breath—

The blood drop splatter became a disrupted spray again a vertical instead of the horizontal surface—

The dust jigged through the air, disturbed by something rapidly passing by the motes—

Shadows cast by a bonfire stilled as if the dancers casting them stopped to take note of a new figure stepping closer to them—

And a facsimile heart made of stolen blood and ancient dust beat silently in time with the one in his chest as he turned to the mirror that had been directly behind him when he was sitting. The sound began softly as he gazed at it, steadily becoming louder yet leveling out before it rose above a comfortable range.

And comforting it was, to watch and hear and feel. Strife raised one hand to his chest, tentatively resting it over the spot where Parv’s heart sat. Did he have any right to say it was _his_ heart now? Was it within the realm of conceivability that he would keep it for the long term? Or would there come a point where he would return it, and regain his own distorted impersonation of a heart?

He lowered his hand and looked to the floor. Well, maybe it wasn’t _that_ much of a misinterpreted organ. It was serving Parv well, at least in the pumping-his-blood-through-his-body, keeping-him-alive sense. As far as he knew Parv hadn’t turned into one of the undead for lack of properly circulating oxygen and platelets. And the emotion part worked, that was just as important – was the whole point of the exchange. Get Parv back to normal.

He could also have put up with an emotionless Parv long enough to switch them back again right after. Had it been selfish of him to want Parvis to keep it? Had he been selfish in deciding to keep Parv’s heart? It didn’t seem like the guitarist minded…

Strife suddenly wondered if Parv was still able to dream. Would someone accustomed to dreaming even notice that their dreams were gone? As far as he understood people didn’t have these visions every night, so perhaps someone wouldn’t notice. Could someone go for the rest of their life never dreaming again? He almost wanted to ask Parv about it, if he remembered to in the morning.

Was he supposed to be this aware, anyway? He glanced up at the mirrors again.

The heart had changed. Looping veins and arteries had grown out of it and they disappeared against the right-hand edge of the frame. The neighboring mirror had a smaller version of a circulatory system blossoming across it, until there was a head to toe human form standing within it like a biology chart. The figure made of bicolored capillaries didn’t move save for a regular pulse that radiated out of the heart, highlighting outward through the arteries and back inward through the veins. Strife wasn’t sure what this was meant to show him. He knew what that layout was. It was an effective design. Again, the comparison to the infrastructure of his tower came to mind.

It was easier to draw a parallel between a human body and a building than with himself.

The final mirror had a shadowed form standing the same as the bare circulatory system. Strife attempted to analyze the outline of the shadows, match it up to someone – well, with the running theme it was likely Parv, yet the… _stillness_ of the figure indicated otherwise. Strife doubted that even a dream-Parv could be so stationary. Actually, the more he looked at it the more the figure seemed to be peering out of the mirror, almost matching his movements as he used different angles to try to discern features. It wasn’t perfectly mimicking him, so it wasn’t as if the shadow was his reflection. It might have been studying _him_ and trying to figure _him_ out.

Strife shook his head, heaving a sigh as he returned to the mirror of fog again. It had settled back into place although the different areas of color inside it were swirling together in agitation. Some of the red seemed to zip toward the edge butting up against the shadow’s mirror frame. Strife gave it a disparaging look. It would never be happy about anything it couldn’t control.

A sudden flicker of light in the shadow’s mirror drew his attention back over. No, not a light, but the contrast of pale skin as the palm of a hand appeared to press against the shadow’s chest – or against the “inside” of the mirror, even. It drew back, flattening with fingers reaching forward. The fingertips bumped into the glass. The hand withdrew, disappearing behind the blackness of the shadow, which appeared unchanged by the phantom appendage.

Then there was a change to the fog, one area right in the center of it lightening to a soft greenish hue. The hand appeared again, the new aqua color becoming a glowing light that spiraled around its reaching fingers as it pressed through the fog and _out of the mirror’s surface_ toward him. Strife balked and stepped backward. Meanwhile, the dark fog roiled around the hole created in it. The spiral circling the hand continued up along the arm it belonged to, clearing away more of the fog as it spun a thread of warm light. The hand turned palm-upward as it reached, fingers poised to clasp at Strife’s own hand if only he would hold it out in return.

Parv’s face appeared on the other side of the thinning cloud. He was smiling, though not the absurd, somewhat terrifying grin he usually sported. This was an expression bordering on serene, a calmness that was maintained even as the fog seemed to gather itself to attack. Parv closed his eyes against it and leaned his arm further out of the mirror. He turned to the side just enough, getting as far as his shoulder before shaking his arm a little, silently indicating he could move no further and Strife would have to make the step to take his hand. Parv opened his eyes and there were aqua spirals within them as well.

Strife met his gaze and tried to read into Parv’s expression . Beyond that smile, beyond his eyes, what _truly_ lay behind the guitarist’s intentions?

Should he take the offered hand?

Should he brace himself for another one of Parv’s misadventures?

Should he assume _something_ will go wrong?

Maybe it wouldn’t go wrong this time, maybe it wouldn’t be a _mis_ adventure but an insightful and lucrative one. Maybe it would be a helping hand.

Maybe he was imagining Parv there and he would just pass through him if he tried to take his hand.

Only one way to find out.

 


End file.
